At the beginning of November Google launched its new smartphones, Pixel and Pixel XL. Initially, both devices were met with praise and acclaimed by the audience. But at that time no one thought about security. According news from “The Hacker News“ web, this turned out to be a problem when only 2 weeks later, during the PwnFest festival in Seoul, Chinese hackers hacked one of the smartphones in astonishing 60 seconds.
The PwnFest festival gathers many specialists in information technologies and also hackers. They share their experiences and demonstrate their skills at cracking into different apps and mobile devices. For such demonstration Chinese hacker team Qihoo 360 chose the Google smartphone. After the hack, they were able to get a full access to all information on the phone, including contacts, messages, photos, and so on. The team received a $120.000 prize for their achievement. By the way, that wasn’t the most impressive hack during the festival. The latest version of the Safari browser was hacked in 20 seconds and Adobe Flash didn’t even last 4 seconds.
Despite having worked on their smartphones for years, Google was unable to add good security to its products. Hopefully, this mishap won’t affect company’s future and we’ll see improved mobile devices from Google.
